The Strange Career of the Affective Fallacy
How a New Critical Dogma Shaped Literary Theory

About this book:

For decades, the academy treated emotion as a contaminant in literary study—a "fallacy" to be quarantined so criticism could claim the rigor of science. *The Strange Career of the Affective Fallacy* tells the gripping story of how that ban was built, enforced, and ultimately shattered. Beginning with Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1949 manifesto, this book traces the high-stakes battle between detached formalism and the irrepressible human need to be moved by art, revealing how the effort to purge feeling from reading shaped the very identity of modern literary theory.

From the Cold War classroom to the frontiers of cognitive poetics, the narrative sweeps across the major uprisings that brought the reader back to the center of the text: the Reader-Response revolution, the feminist and postcolonial critiques that exposed "objectivity" as a mask for power, the psychoanalytic turn that uncovered the unconscious desires driving interpretation, and the contemporary "Affective Turn" that locates meaning in bodily sensation itself. Each chapter reads like an intellectual thriller, pitting the architects of cool detachment against the insurgents who insisted that literature’s power lies precisely in its capacity to wound, console, and transform.

Today, as algorithmic "distant reading" and digital humanities offer sleek new versions of technocratic objectivity, the war between the artifact and the affect has never been more urgent. Written with scholarly authority and passionate conviction, this is the definitive history of criticism’s longest-running argument—and a vital manifesto for a future where formal rigor and emotional truth are no longer enemies, but partners in the act of reading.